What is Atlee up to? Maggs Bros book dealers offer reward to solve Punch cartoon mystery

What is Atlee up to? Maggs Bros book dealers offer reward to solve Punch cartoon mystery

London rare books and manuscripts dealer Maggs Bros is offering a small reward to anyone who can help solve a mystery contained in a cartoon of Winston Churchill.

Frances Allitt

26 Jan 2018

EH Shepard’s Leonardo da Whinny original pen and ink drawing. It show Churchill in his studio before a painting of current prime minister Clement Atlee and measures 12.5 x 9.5in (31.5 x 24cm) including caption which is on a separate strip attached to the bottom of the drawing. It is offered framed and glazed for £12,500.

Frances Allitt

26 Jan 2018

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The cartoon was published in Punch magazine on May 7, 1947. It shows the former prime minister in his studio with a canvas in the behind him showing current leader Clement Atlee in an upside-down industrial cityscape flanked by his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and chancellor Hugh Dalton.

But what is Atlee doing with his left hand? The Bedford Square dealership is offering a small reward to anyone who can suggest a plausible answer.

Drawn by EH Shepard the pen and ink drawing is captioned ‘Leonardo da Whinny’ and came out the same week that the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opened with one of Churchill’s paintings, Winter Sunshine, Chartwell, on show. It was exhibited under the pseudonym ‘David Winter’.

Maggs Bros is offering the piece framed and glazed for £12,500.

The World Crisis

Maggs is also offering a complete set of first editions of Churchill’s multi-volume work The World Crisis. The books were gifted to Maurice Hankey, the most senior civil servant in Churchill’s war administration.

Maggs is also offering Maurice Hankey’s eight-volume first edition set of Winston Churchill’s ‘The World Crisis’ for £50,000.

“He knew everything; he could put his hand on anything; he knew everybody; he said nothing; he gained the confidence of all,” Churchill wrote of him.

The set is comprised of eight volumes covering 1911-31 and the books are offered in their original blue cloth, lettered in blind on front covers and in gilt on spines.

Volume 4 is inscribed: My dear Hankey, Although you have been good enough to read the bulk of this book before, I hope you will not mind my sending you a copy to put in yr library. Yours sincly Winston S. Churchill.